Most of all, she should have asked Joko Daishi whether Akahata’s target was a subway car or a subway platform. Maybe he wouldn’t have answered. Maybe he would have been delighted to tell her. Now all Mariko could do was wonder which target was worse. Detonating a bomb inside a subway car would contain the blast, all but guaranteeing everyone aboard would die. Detonating it on the platform would let the bomb’s fury disperse, trading guaranteed fatalities for a far greater number of injuries.
It was possible, of course, that Mariko and Han had it wrong altogether, that Akahata was bound for somewhere else, some other target they hadn’t even imagined. But Mariko couldn’t allow herself to think that way. She made the best guess she could on the evidence she had—and following that logic, she committed herself to another hypothesis: Akahata would hit a platform, not a subway car. For one thing, he’d prefer a fixed location, a place he could observe, timing the blast to maximize his body count. For another, there were dozens of train cars to choose from, and only two likely stations. Mariko
She heard Sakakibara’s voice over the radio just as she was approaching her final turn. She ripped the steering wheel over, her tires shrieking in protest, and as soon as she could free a hand she snatched up the mic. “Sir?”
“We reached Transportation. They’ve got the stations closed. That game let out ten minutes ago, Frodo. You’re going to have a crowd.”
“I see them.” Her tires screeched again as she stomped on the brakes.
“Backup’s on the way, but you’re the—”
Mariko didn’t stop to hear the rest. “On the way” wasn’t good enough news to wait for the details. She brought the car to a halt just a few meters from the mob that had gathered outside Korakuen Station.
Just as Sakakibara had said, someone in TMPD had reached the Bureau of Transportation and ordered them to close the station. They’d done it wisely too, posting an OUT OF SERVICE notice at the entryway. Mariko hoped that might turn some of the crowd away, because a good-sized blast down on the platform would send a shock wave up the stairs too. Anyone up top was standing in the muzzle of a flamethrower.
Fighting her way through the crowd, she wanted to shout at the top of her lungs, telling them there was a great big goddamn bomb right below their feet and they ought to get the hell out of her way. But panicked mobs were dangerous, and her next best plan—firing her SIG P230 in the air like a sheriff in a cowboy movie—would panic them too. So all she could do was lead with her elbows and knees and shout, “TMPD! Make way!”
She knew it was only seconds but it felt like it took forever to burrow a tunnel through the mass of fans. When she finally reached the turnstile, she planted a palm on it and got overeager on her jump, almost pulling a one-handed cartwheel as she cleared it. It cost her a stutter step when she hit the ground. She came close to rolling her ankle but didn’t. Then her SIG was in her left hand and she was racing toward the stairs.
There were two flights, one for the eastbound tracks, one for the westbound. Which one would Akahata choose? The one with the greater promise for passengers, Mariko supposed. But she didn’t know where the most Giants fans lived. She didn’t know where people went after ball games. Han would have known. She wanted to call him but she didn’t want to take the time. She wanted to pause for a few seconds, to mentally locate herself on the city map, to reason it out, but she didn’t have time for that either. Paralysis through analysis. Overthinking was the enemy. Sometimes you just had to act.
She took the closest flight of stairs and didn’t even bother to look whether it led her to the eastbound or westbound trains. When she got to the bottom, she found the platform occupied. There were forty or fifty people down there—hardly crowded by Tokyo’s standards, but Mariko was surprised to see anyone at all. Mentally she kicked herself for being so stupid: the station might have been closed at street level, but nothing could prevent people from disembarking trains they’d already boarded elsewhere.
It was the kind of platform with two sets of parallel tracks between it and the opposite platform. Every surface seemed to shimmer: the steel tops of the rails, buffed hundreds of times a day by the wheels of train cars; the pillars wearing their ceramic tiles like snakeskin; more ceramic tiles on the walls, still more lining the floor; the ceiling panels, flat and smooth as mirrors. Commuters ambled about in a kind of human Brownian motion, fiddling with book bags or sending texts.
Mariko spotted Akahata in their midst, loitering, dressed as a sanitation worker. He stood four or five paces away from a wheeled caddy that held a big blue trash can and a bunch of cleaning supplies. People were keeping their distance, predictably scared of the guy who looked like he’d just limped away from a knock-down, drag-out bar brawl. His face was still a ruin, a spatter pattern of purple and red. Mariko watched a girl, walking idly and texting, come close enough to catch him in her peripheral vision. The girl started, blanched, and backed away. Mariko wondered how many others had done the same.
Akahata looked at the girl, and looking past her, he saw Mariko.
His bloodshot eyes flicked to the trash can. It was big, heavy, but sitting on its stout plastic casters it would be easy for one guy to move. Perfect for housing a great big bomb.
Mariko put her front sight on him. Civilians crowded her backdrop; doubts about her aim infected her mind. A moment’s hesitation was all Akahata needed. He grabbed a high school boy in uniform and held him like a human shield. One bruised forearm snaked around the kid’s throat, tight as a python.
“Let him go!” Mariko shouted.
Akahata responded by chanting his mantra and taking one step toward the trash can on his caddy.
For a fleeting second Mariko wondered why she was still alive. Why hadn’t Akahata unleashed his bomb? Then she understood: he didn’t have a remote detonator. There was no need for one. He’d been waiting for masses of baseball fans to crowd the platform; the trigger was on the bomb itself, and he wouldn’t trigger it until his victims had walled him in. As he took one more step toward the caddy, Mariko was surer than ever that his trash can was an enormous IED.
Mariko moved to flank him, trying to cut an angle around the kid so she’d have a clean shot at center body mass. But the kid was struggling, jerking Akahata this way and that. He wasn’t strong enough to break Akahata’s lunatic strength, but his tugging and twisting gave Mariko a constantly moving target.
She shifted targets, aiming at Akahata’s head. Her backdrop still wasn’t clear. Some of the commuters had the sense to flee, but too many panicked, frozen like so many deer caught in the glow of an oncoming light. Mariko kept moving to flank, yelling at Akahata to let the kid go, sidestepping until her backdrop was the empty black tunnel above the train tracks. It hardly mattered. A head shot behind a struggling human shield was damn near impossible even for an expert marksman. Cops went to sniper school to make shots like that—and they didn’t do it southpaw either.
Akahata took another step toward the trash can. His eyes were wide and wild, his head lurching this way and that as his hostage tried in vain to break his grip. The kid seemed more scared of Mariko’s pistol than of Akahata, flinching at the sight of it, squirming whenever it moved. Stupid, Mariko thought; if you’d just stay still for a second, this pistol will save your life.
“Last warning,” she said, not at all sure she meant it, “let the kid go.”
Akahata broke off from his mantra and said, “What difference does it make? He will die. We all die in the end. Don’t you see that’s what we’re trying to teach you?”
Mariko had no time for the religious bullshit, but she saw a different truth in Akahata’s words. If he reached that bomb, everyone on the platform would die. Just as well to start shooting, and if she killed the kid, so be it, so long as she brought down Akahata too.
Maybe Han would have pulled the trigger, but Mariko couldn’t cross that line. If the kid was bound to die anyway, better for it to be at the hands of a mass murderer than a cop. Even so, she wished the kid was the type to freeze up and piss his pants. She had plenty of training hitting stationary targets. By now she could have slowed her breath, taken her bead, made that slow squeeze on the trigger.
And now she was overthinking it. She knew it. Paralysis through analysis. She tried to keep her front sight zeroed on Akahata’s face, but the more she concentrated on keeping it steady, the more it wavered. Yamada- sensei would have told her to holster her pistol. She could almost hear him say it: the good swordsman would rather drop his blade than squeeze it tighter with the wrong grip. Drop it and pick it up again. That was the better course. But Mariko was too scared to drop her weapon.
Akahata switched the kid from his right arm to his left. Freeing his right hand to reach the detonator, Mariko thought. He was close to the bomb now. One more step and he’d have it.
Han would have shot him by now. To hell with the psychological games and moral dilemmas. That’s what
